[Leica] major Lightroom/Bridge discovery

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

OK, maybe I'm the last guy on the planet to figure this out, but in case I'm 
not I thought I'd mention it.

Because of its keywording and searching and database capabilities and 
general metadata excellence, I've been using Lightroom for a couple of years 
now, to hold and print all of my images. I have version 2.6.

But Lightroom's editing capabilities totally suck compared to Photoshop, and 
the person who designed Lightroom's cropping mechanism should be 
waterboarded. So I use Photoshop for most serious image editing.

But, alas, the interface between Lightroom and Photoshop is very cumbersome 
and slow.

This weekend I figured out that if you're dealing with psd or jpeg or tiff 
files (not dng), and if you don't use the "virtual copy" feature of 
Lightroom, you can overlay Bridge on top of the Lightroom folder, Photoshop 
to your heart's content, and then use Lightroom's Library->Synchronize 
Folder feature to reabsorb all of the changes you made in Photoshop and 
Bridge.

If you do this, you of course lose the edits you made in Lightroom, but I 
for one find most of Lightroom's image editing capabilities to be so 
pathetic that I mostly don't use them. And if I do use them, I can just ask 
it to commit those changes to the image by exporting it on top of itself, so 
that Bridge will see them. This loses the history and the undo capability, 
but it's worth it.

For a single image, you can flit happily between Lightroom and Bridge. Any 
metadata change that you make in Lightroom will show up instantly in Bridge, 
and vice versa. For me, this is huge. I can use Lightroom to manage the 
metadata and Bridge to manage the data itself and get the best of both 
worlds.